A device that shows a graph of voltage over time, as supercunt said without it you really are blind to whats whats going on inside a circuit.

Last time I did any work using scrum the manager decided we all lied about the estimated time to completion and took each of us to task then said we "agreed" to knock 50% to 66% of the estimated time off the timeframe. Then he started pestering and nagging us to twice daily complete a document listing what we've done so far. After 3 days into what was meant to be a 3 month long part time project we all left and never went back.

Ended up being a real shit show because it was a project done in cooperation between my colleges engineering department and its business center that hosted this fuckers pet project (a fitness / smart watch / internet of things wonder product). We were meant to not do the work of professionals but build a rough proof of concept prototype over the course of a semester but he wanted it done asap to well some pretty fucking ridiculous standards for college students because he was desperate to pitch the idea to investors, we completed the project to our original spec on the original timeframe (because we needed to finish something to get a grade) but made doubly sure the college did not give him anything from the project.

Would draw.io suit you? Its not really for workflow management but you can make fancy pants flowcharts and diagrams while keeping it neat.

IDK if its useable on Windows Phone but you can save it as your work an xml file you can then upload and continue working on it so you could use it to update any progress.

They are outsourcing blue collar jobs as well.

http://www.euronews.com/2016/09/16/workers-march-over-caterpillar-job-cuts

http://www.bdtonline.com/news/caterpillar-call-center-closing-in-downtown-bluefield/article_a60c8566-8058-11e6-8ebc-6f720f3543fa.html

http://www.worldcement.com/africa-middle-east/22092016/Caterpillar-dealers-announce-billion-investment-Africa-315/

An awful lot of the Intel low power and cheap stuff after Bay Trail-T have been quite good for their price. Cheap but you don't really get much of a laptop in the sub 300 dollar range anyway, you can almost always disable secure boot so if you want Linux it might be possible. Very energy efficient but really designed to blur the line between phones + tablets to laptops so it sacrifices a fair but to make that possible, a lot of 2 in 1 hybrids like Asus Transformers and Acer Switch series use the Intel Atom processors which arn't bad just not great.

Models with decent battery life and performance are priced in and around 300 euro / dollars, don't make the mistake of buying the lower price sub 10 inch models like I did. I used to have a Linx7 which for what it was could do almost anything I wanted (I could play HL2 between 25 to 40fps bu it oddly struggled with the first Deus Ex) but and poor thermal characteristics meant when I put it under a bit of stress its battery tanked so it just couldn't really be a daily driver but it was great at playing back media and did a great job browsing the internet just that battery was crap, its screen was also a little two small to do anything but in landscape mode with a stand and a bluetooth keyboard I managed to get a couple project reports written for college without any problems (windows 8 and 10 on screen keyboards are quite good for a device that size).

It all comes down to how cheap you want to go. I'm in the market myself for a new small form factor cheap passively cooled laptop / hybrid myself and I've been eyeballing something like a Asus Transformer Book T100HA (4gb of ram, 64gb eMMC storage, Atom X5 8500), now I know for a fact you can manage Win8.1 or 10 reasonably well on as low as 1gb of ram so 2gb isn't that bad when you temper your expectations but no matter what you get make sure it has more than 32gb of storage space because that shit was barely usable. Acer, HP, and I think Toshiba have 2 in 1 convertibles that include a slim HDD in the keyboard dock.

All that said you can program on almost anything, its all a question of how cheap you really want to go.

Thats actually something the idiot behind this nonsense started saying in the final few weeks of last years classes. He really is a moron but like one of those clever morons that thinks that we should all be on the same page as him because he has been doing this as a career since the late 90s and doesn't think its particularly hard.

Hes that guy that pushes everyone around him to use Linux and acts like you can be on par with how you'd use Windows overnight because again hes been using it since the late 90s and its ingrained knowledge to him, you know that kind of snobbery of how much more superior Linux might be while ignoring the fact that doing anything more advanced than browsing the web can be a real struggle just trying to find valid information on how you'd go about fixing the problem can take a lot of time as well as trial and error. He'd know that he can do this, this, and that to fix the problem were as a novice would putter around trying to find out how to start the few first steps. Some people are just totally unaware of how many niche things they know and how much effort its taken for them to gain that knowledge.

AVR micros get a but funny when you accidentally change a port fuse and nuke a port pin. Arduino stuff was introduced to us last semester and theres nothing wrong with it or AVR micrcos but using Arduinos native language would hog up a lot of program memory space if you wern't careful when things got more elaborate than flashing LEDs and needed a internet connected sensor that also had a user interface so some of us learned a little AVR C as a way to save an awful lot of program space, quite a few of us managed to permanently damage their microcontrollers very quickly.

PIC also uses one really well developed, really powerful, really helpful tool called MPLAB where we could simulate most if not all of a supported PIC's functionality before programming it meaning you can get really nitty gritty over usage of program or instruction memory. Theres a like for like equivalent for AVR but those fuses potentially a nightmare for my colleges lectures and maintenance.

Assembly is the mnemonics for opcodes, you can calculate out each op code ahead of time then fire it into instruction memory for really fast results. You'd be basically doing Assembly to machine code by hand. Only really a thing you'd see in embedded programming when you have to shave off any unnecessary clock cycles where resources are extremely scarce or when your brand new x86 processor is being evaluated in the lap only to discover that certain instructions are returning incorrect values and you need a bit of microcode to correct it (also happens with GPUs all the time).

I started with C for desktop, then Assembly for PIC, two separate C for PIC courses, then in at the deep end with no resources Java for desktop cause that makes sense. Next year its more C for PIC and then Java / Android app development just to fucking annoy us (I think we'd get more mileage from a.Linux Bash / embedded os intro than we would an android app).

Opcodes, just saying.

Any language can be an ideal place to start, you'll have an awful lot of basics to cover before you can really do anything advanced and the basics don't change much unless you are already familiar with the basics of another language and not all that capable of compartmentalizing what works where and doesn't work elsewhere.

Not all languages are equal but some are just easier to mess up and force you to go back snakes and ladders style to rewrite parts while dealing with what past you thought was a good idea or good enough solution at the time. Remember there is no perfect programming language, some work really well for certain kinds of projects while others lend themselves to other kinds of projects while none are exclusively this or that project only.

If you just want to understand how programming works you can find an introduction to C programming guide which should cover the importance of logical planning, incremental changes, testing as you go, data manipulations, how memory gets used and reused, and the limitations of a PC (it does what you tell it 99.99999% of the time and nothing else). Now if you want to make something that other people might like to use like a game, a phone app or something like that then you'd have an easier time learning how to do that with something like Java.

That or you could try https://unity3d.com/learn/tutorials first.

Can't imagine many of them will stay for very long, pretty soon we'll start seeing demands from GitHubs identity politics ideologues to force the adoption of the same "anti harassment" rules and guidelines directly into a projects decision making as well as every community space of a project e.g. if you don't force the adoption of GitHub approved anti harassment rules on your community forums. website, etc or you don't have a mandatory quota of multi racial / gender contributors your project will be removed from GitHub.

I'll give it 3-4 months before the first large project starts migrating away, maybe another 2-3 before things stabilize from the inevitable SJW backlash (DDOS attacks, attempted domain seizures, hit pieces attacking GitHub competitors and projects that move etc).

Try to learn good commenting habits now rather than later. Its easy to write too much and end up writing comments for everything but as long as you keep it neat and simply remember to ask yourself "do I need to explain this?" you should be fine, if you need to write an essay write an essay but just keep it sensible and on topic. You might not need a comment for a variable with a simple name like distance but if you were to take the variable pass it though a function then store the output of that function as something like "float distB; " then it might be wise to say //is product of function whatever// just to save yourself having to scroll up and down through your own code to find out whats going, you will end up spending a lot of time trying to figure out why your code isn't working so clear succinct commenting helps.

Beginner code should be clear and logical to anyone even someone with zero coding experience as long as the comments are on topic and laconic. Commenting is as much for yourself as it is for someone else reading your code, future you might spend more time than you should trying to figure out what was going on in your own code so learning these kinds of habits becomes important fairly quickly.

Milo Yiannopoulos is also fun to follow, posh gay conservative fighting for cis-white male rights.... I swear to God we shifted into Bizzaro World at some point.

conservative social and political thinking (not to be confused with hard right hyper conservative politics) generally attract lots of very capable, very rational people from all walks of life, where as pseudo liberalism (not to be confused with all left leaning groups / people) tends to attract people who are not so capable or rational and think they have something to gain by reordering the world to specifically favor certain groups over others in the name of their brand of "equality".

Its not all the surprising someone with an intellect and bucket load of wit while also happening to be gay can see though the horse shit (narrative over facts) that the fake progressives try to force feed everyone.

They're in those spaces for the same reason they are in indie game dev spaces, alt culture music genres, comics, youtube, and generally anywhere that is typically male dominated but not exclusively for men and have no barriers to entry based on gender or physical appearance in order to have the audience "opposition" they desperately want to validated of their beliefs. Nothing proves you need feminism like being told that feminism has no place in a place which doesn't give a fuck about your gender, looks, beliefs, or pronouns.

You'd know that most open source places (and in the real world) have an unwritten "close your mouth unless you've got something worth hearing" policy meaning you don't get attention when you talk about shit unless there is a specific reason to pay attention to what you say. If you want to talk about this or that being sexist you would have probably been told that this isn't the place to discuss such things and anyone doing real work was just not interested. These ego parasites need to inject identity politics where ever they can because it erases the unwritten policy, it makes it important to listen to certain people because gender or race becomes a factor in a place where no one has a gender or race before now.

Codes of Conduct changes, anti harassment initiatives, women in X drives etc from these people are all efforts to grandstand on the stage of identity politics because resistance proves you were right to suggest things change and acceptance demonstrates you are a progressive activist making the world a "better" place. That and they are always followed around by loud, poorly informed groupies who hear the key words of "women, harassment, racism" and chime in like they know anything. _{(just like me)}

Unity's scripting component, if I remember right, is Mono which is essentially C# by another name. Might be worth your time tinkering around with it and get comfortable with it, then try to poke around inside Unitys community offering some free time and expertise to anyone willing to let to let you contribute and take things as far as you can from there. It might put you on a path towards that team-centered coding familiarity you want.

Unity has oodles of documentation, guides, how to's etc and its free for personal use, can't get cheaper than that.

Where to start is something you're going to have to decide because some languages lend themselves towards particular types of problem solving. Programming is basically planning and using logic to accomplish a task or solve a problem, the real skills involved (problem solving, self learning, sensible documentation, and planning) are near universally transferable from one language to another so starting with any of the "easier" languages shouldn't be seen as a negative as long as you don't wade into a new language and expect to do everything the same way.

https://i.imgur.com/d9cU904.png (might help)

You don't really need books to get started and the only developer tools I'd suggest is a relatively comfortable to use chair+desk+keyboard+mouse+screen, as far as software goes just use whatever is most popular and standardized for your language choice because it will probably work just as well as the next option for 99% of what you'd be doing at first. The reason I'd suggest you keep away from books at first is you can get quite a lot of online video lectures, forums, reference material and documentation online, then once you've gotten a handle on the very basics (only takes 10 minutes to get hello world on screen but it can take a couple hours to understand what you've done) you can grab a book and dive in once you're comfortable.

The only thing really asked out of you is the discipline to assign your own goals and know whats involved in getting it, if you want to make a game for example you've got to understand quite a lot about never ending loops and constantly updating strings and arrays (updated within loops).

so first you might learn how a loop works (write program using a loop to add two numbers together and print the output)

then you learn how an array and string works (write a program to print and sort / manipulate each part of a string)

then you learn about taking user inputs and storing in the strings and arrays (write programs to take keystrokes(store+manipulate+sort+print them and only exits / finishes when the user wishes to exit)

them you learn how to combine your string and array inputs with other strings or arrays in loops to manipulate the results printed to screen each time the user enters a number / keystroke (write a text based choose your own adventure game using strings, arrays, and loops to enable the user to choose which door take and which objects to interact with, add and remove items from their inventory (a key to unlock a locked door for example))

Then buy yourself a book on how to program, I might sound like an ass telling you to learn how to program before buying a learn how to program book but a book can't always force you to understand a concept like strings. loops, functions, arrays etc. Beginners books can explain how to make things happen but until you've dived in and pushed yourself to understand whats happening you can only go so far.

Pic assembly is fun, oh and so is linked lists in C.